Polls

We track two races here: the national fight for control of the House, and the D.C. mayor’s race to replace Muriel Bowser. The numbers below update on their own — a script checks the public record every few hours and recalculates the average. No one on staff is retyping these by hand, and we’d rather show you exactly how the number is built than ask you to trust a black box.

National: the generic congressional ballot

This is the standard “if the election were held today, would you vote for the Democrat or the Republican in your district” number, averaged across the major public poll trackers — RealClearPolitics, Silver Bulletin, VoteHub, and others — rather than a number we derived ourselves from raw polls. We’re a small newsroom without a data team; averaging the trackers that already do this rigorously is the honest move, not a shortcut.

D.C.: the 2026 mayor’s race

Bowser isn’t running again. The general election is Janeese Lewis George (Democratic) against Robert L. Gross (D.C. Statehood Green) on November 3. We only display a general-election average once pollsters actually publish one — the parser is built to specifically require both nominees’ names before it will accept a table, so a Democratic primary poll can never get mistaken for a real read on the general.

Source data: Wikipedia’s continuously updated election-polling articles, which are themselves sourced to the pollsters and aggregators linked in each table. We recompute our average from whatever is currently published there; we don’t editorialize the number.